Beast Stalker (2008)
8/10
The Beast Stalker
15 December 2016
Warning: Spoilers
Sergeant Tong Fei is a Hong Kong police officer and, as the story starts, he and his team are planning to arrest a senior gangster, Cheung Yat-tung. Unfortunately Cheung manages to escape; Tong and his colleague Sun give chase but it ends in tragedy; there is a car crash after which Cheung and his men steal a woman's car, Tong opens fire and the car crashes. When he gets to the car he finds Cheung seriously injured and blood dripping from the boot; he opens it and sees that there is a young girl inside… mortally wounded by the shots he fired into the car.

A few months later Cheung wakes from his coma and the chief prosecutor wants him to be tried as soon as possible. There is a complication though; the woman's whose daughter was killed is the lawyer who will be leading the prosecution and Cheung has ordered the kidnap of her other daughter to force her to destroy the one piece of conclusive evidence against him. She is told not to tell the police but Tong was present when the girl was snatched so determines to save her before she is seriously harmed.

When I picked up this film I knew almost nothing about it, just the blurb on the back of the DVD box, so assumed it might be exciting over-the-top action like many of the Hong Kong cop films I'd seen before… it does have plenty of moments of excitement and is very tense for most of its run-time but if you are expecting to see our hero dealing with hordes of bad guys you might be disappointed… if however you like the idea of a hero who is mostly acting alone searching for a single foe interesting then this might be the film for you. Nicholas Tse does a fine job as Tong and Nick Cheung impresses as his target; the killer hired by Cheung to kidnap the girl. This character could easily have been a pantomime villain but his back story, which we don't fully learn about till the end, makes him more human. The action scenes are pretty good; especially the car crash which is top notch. If this was a Hollywood film I'd have been sure that the kidnapped girl would be rescued but here I wasn't so sure and more than once thought something really bad could happen to her… this concern made things incredibly tense at times. Overall I'd certainly recommend this to anybody wanting a good tense cop-thriller.

These comments are based on watching the film in Cantonese with English subtitles.
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